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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

I used to see a heavy dose of my subscribed channels in my recommendations, now only a fraction of them are represented. We're talking channels where I watch nearly every video they post but they won't show up in my recommendations. There's clearly stuff Youtube "likes" and even a naive recommendation engine would perform better.

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Same here. That's why I changed a couple of subscribed channels to send me notifications, it puts updates of these channels in the notifications area and sends me an email for every update. The June 2019 change of algorithm was that big and hostile that I had to turn on notifications.

interesting, there must be some variation in the algorithm.

I have just loaded Youtube and in the 8 recommendations above the fold :

- 4 of them are from my subscriptions

- 1 is the last published in a series of videos I have been watching, published 2 hours ago

- 1 is from a channel I have never watched AFAIK, but contains a sketch from a comic duo I watched often on Youtube

- leaving 2 lectures that don't come directly from what I watched recently.

If anything, I would prefer if Youtube was pushing way more original topics.

One thing I have remarked is that their algorithm is very "grippy". Once it identifies a topic you might be interested in, it makes sure to find other videos on the same topic.

As an example I stumbled on a beautiful video about what life is like for an man with autism. The next day Youtube recommended me a video where women with autism talk about their lives (actually I remember having already watched that video several years ago, so a meh recommendation). Today Youtube wants me to watch a video about autistic children in China.

Also, with the magic of A/B groups, we might be running on 2 very different algorithms for all we know.

> even a naive recommendation engine would perform better.

I think you are underestimating the complexity of the problem :)

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